Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Recently eaten: roast beef sandwichRecent annoyance: working on a day when public transportation is running on a saturday schedule

They found an albino moose in Norway and now they want to shoot it. I guess I'm okay with that. I wonder if albino moose meat tastes any creamier than regular moose meat. Like white chocolate. It's hard to say whether this moose is good or evil. On one hand, Native Americans believe a white buffalo has magical properties. On the other hand, all those albino kids in Children of the Corn were super-evil. It's a toss-up. Better not to hedge our bets. Let's just shoot the thing and eat it's delicous, milky meat.

White Moose Sparks Debate The moose hunting season starts on Thursday, and hunting parties in the Østfold area where the rare albino moose has been sighted have asked that the animal be protected, NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting) reports.

But the head of the wildlife committee in the area, Sigmund Lerheim, can make no promises.

"I can't guarantee that it will survive as long as there are people who disagree that it should get to live," Lerheim said. "There are hunt quotas, where moose are specified by age and sex. But there is nothing about a moose having to be brown, gray or white," Lerheim said.

Fair gameWhen the sighting was reported in newspaper Moss Avis only one local hunter was vocal about the white moose being fair game, and he has received support from scientists.

"It is surely entertaining to have an albino moose wandering in the woods but in purely breeding terms it is not right to let it live," Morten Brommdal, manager of the animal section at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Oslo told Moss Avis.

"That so many people want the white moose to live is an emotional issue. It is exciting to have such a rarity rustling around. But if it is spared we risk the moose's breeding qualities spreading. Soon we might two, three, four or five albino moose in these wooded areas, something which in the long run can weaken the herd," said Brommdal, who pointed out that an albino moose is really a kind of 'mistake'.

More vulnerableJon Arnemo, professor at the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science (NVH), agreed that the albino moose was a rarity, though not a sensation.

"We estimate that there are about 450,000 moose in Scandinavia, of which about a third are shot every year. There are usually reports of one white moose every year," Arnemo told Moss Avis.

These animals are rarely very old. Their lack of pigmentation makes them more exposed to predators like wolves and they often have inferior sight or hearing.

Arnemo said that it was not yet certain that the sighted moose was a genuine albino, with a total lack of pigment and red eye, or a 'common' moose without pigmentation.

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About Me

On the evolutionary scale, I am quite advanced from the skull down: little to no hair on arms and legs, fantastically long toes, and virtually indestructible exoskeleton. However, my skull retains it's australopithecine sagittal crest. I have worn my molars down from years of grinding on mammoth bones. My keen wolf-like sense of smell can lead me to food within a 10 mile radius.